The Man Who Invented Christmas Videos

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Movie Info

The Man Who Invented Christmas tells of the magical journey that led to the creation of Ebenezer Scrooge (Christopher Plummer), Tiny Tim and other classic characters from A Christmas Carol. Directed by Bharat Nalluri (MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY), the film shows how Charles Dickens (Dan Stevens) mixed real life inspirations with his vivid imagination to conjure up unforgettable characters and a timeless tale, forever changing the holiday season into the celebration we know today.

Critic Reviews for The Man Who Invented Christmas

Mainly, the fancy at the centre of The Man Who Invented Christmas provides an unusually kinetic literary biography as the writer races against the clock to master the voices of his obstreperous characters in time for the 25th.

Beautiful and darkly festive. Dan Stevens' Dickens is prone to bah humbug, with six weeks to write a Christmas classic. Victorian London is bustling and clean; Plummer's Scrooge dour and mocking; gratifyingly, ordinary people are assumed to be well-read.

It is fascinating to watch how A Christmas Carol comes to be as it is more than just the novella that is responsible for the many Christmas traditions practiced today, but it is the result of a personal evolution for Dickens'.

Audience Reviews for The Man Who Invented Christmas

An interesting look at how the classic Charles Dickens story 'A Christmas Carol' came to be. Dan Stevens does a great job as Dickens but it's the magic of how Dickens was inspired and what it ended up producing is what makes it so magical.

Ian Walker

Super Reviewer

½

An interesting spin on a story most everyone in the West knows by heart, the story behind the story as it were. Nothing too dramatic here (because Christmas is in the very title, eh?), simply lighthearted fun over well known territory. Everyone performs admirably but Plummer, Pryce, Stevens and Coyne (the unseen writer, yah) bring home the bacon.

Kevin M. Williams

Super Reviewer

½

The Man Who Invented Christmas is a compelling and whimsical fictionalized telling of Charles Dickens' writing of A Christmas Carol. Having lost the faith of his publishers after a string of failed novels and dwindling finances, Charles Dickens comes up with a scheme to self-publish a Christmas book that will put him back on top; but to do so he'll have to confront the ghosts of his past. The film does an impressive job at showing the creative process, with Dickens literally bringing characters to life and interacting with them as he develops them. Dan Stevens does a good job at playing Charles Dickens, and Christopher Plummer is perfectly cast as Scrooge. Additionally, newcomer Anna Murphy brings a lot of charisma as the nurse/muse who inspires Dickens. Also, the sets and costumes are especially well-done, giving a real Dickensian feel to the film. Inspirational, with a little bit of magic, The Man Who Invented Christmas is an entertaining look behind the novel that forever changed the way we see Christmas.

Dann Michalski

Super Reviewer

The Man Who Invented Christmas may as well be one of those holiday Hallmark originals for all of the dopey, saccharine spins it puts on Charles Dickens coming up with "A Christmas Carol" and the overall quality of life in 1843, but luckily director Bharat Nalluri (Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day) was working from a screenplay by writer/actor Susan Coyne (Mozart in the Jungle) as adapted from Les Standiford's 2008 novel of the same name where distinctive features of those Hallmark originals (or hallmarks of those hallmarks) come to be non-existent. There is no gushing love story at the center of it, no excessive amount of perfectly pressed pants or flannel (or whatever the equivalent was in 19th century London), but rather there is this overriding feeling that came to pass throughout the entirety of the experience that was one of lovable cheese. The usual suspects of certain clichés and plot points might not all be present, but that feeling of the overwhelming power of pure holiday love and all that it can conquer, is. And while this may just be due to the fact I'm a sucker for the Hallmark channels block of holiday programming to the point I draw every holiday-themed movie back to these standards The Man Who Invented Christmas is so family friendly and earnest in its intent that it's hard to discern between what the movie wants you to feel and what this material should make you feel. As another in a line of "story behind the story" films that have, for one reason or another, decided to catch on some thirteen years after Finding Neverland made it a hot idea to studio execs The Man Who Invented Christmas is perfectly serviceable in delivering all of the broad moments required by an audience that craves what they already know; the name Marley coming from a waiter at a restaurant where Dickens was eating for instance coupled with the tidbit that he "collected names" for his works from his everyday life. Things one could have just as easily assumed without having concrete proof of them, but this is the kind of depth and insight The Man Who Invented Christmas offers: facts that might not have been necessarily well-known, but ones that are rather obvious in that they aren't surprising and offer little to no real drama that would justify this story about Dickens writing his career-defining novel being a story in its own right.
read the whole review at www.reviewsfromabed.com.